Today’s New York Times profiles Bobby Kotick, the boss of Activision Blizzard and longtime bête noir of many a longtime gamer, many of whom have created unflattering portrayals of him quickly found by Google Image search. Well, he wants you to know this doesn’t help his game. See, he’s divorced and on the prowl.

“Think about what it’s like for my dating life when the first picture that comes up is me as the Devil,” Kotick tells the Times.

A lot of the stuff in the Times‘ profile also surfaced in a Kotaku profile more than two years ago — the mob-movie air of the early days, hitching a ride on a casino mogul’s corporate jet, the subterranean meeting that got his first venture off the ground, brushes with Steve Jobs and the like.

But it does relate some other fun facts.

• Kotick duped the Sheriff’s Office of San Mateo County, Calif. Kotick took over Activision (then known as Mediagenic) at a time when the company’s assets were being seized to pay debts. When a deputy arrived to repo an expensive IBM mainframe in 1990, an office assistant surrendered a PDP-11 instead.

•He’s unremorseful about the showdown with Infinity Ward’s founders. “You find out two executives are planning to break their contracts, keep the money you gave them and steal 40 employees,” he said. “What do you do? You fire them.”

•He calls himself a libertarian, and voted for Mitt Romney.

There’s some other business-y stuff concerning Call of Duty‘s sales, Activision’s share price and pressures on it, and Activision’s success despite the overall sour picture of video game sales. But the key detail is that you meddling video gamers are cockblocking him. Guys, guys, stop high-fiving like that. Please.

I really don't get this whole "Kotick is evil" and "Activision is evil" thing. So they are the biggest publisher in the world right now. They make a lot of money. So what? They are a business, not a charity. They are supposed to be making money. Why is a business evil for making money? I don't get it.

Yes, they churn out Call of Duty games year after year. Maybe you can accuse them of not innovating and moving the industry forward, but what they are doing is smart business sense. They are supplying for the demand. Consumers WANT more Call of Duty games, so they are providing.

Don't blame them for releasing yearly CoD games, blame the sheep who keep buying the games every year.

Yearly CoD games are hardly why they are evil. They are a ruthless company that treat their developers like shit, their consumers like sheep and produce with a slash and burn tactic to make sure every cent possible falls into their pocket.

As a single company the number of developers they are responsible for putting under due to their demands on milestones, release dates etc etc is one of the highest. If you look At comments made by people who used to work for them and developers they have put under (you will find some angry bias of course) but they are pretty much universal on the view that they put profit far and above the value of employees and product.

No body said it was exclusive, if you had read i said "one of the highest", in fact probably the highest. Yes a lot of publishers do this, its their job, but nobody does it like activision, and it pretty much is all because of Kotick.

Read the story in Dan's comment below, and see if you can come back and say they act like any other publisher does.

The truth of the matter is that all publishers are ruthless bastards. I suspect it's probably necessary to continue to exist. Some of the worst experiences I've had as a developer were under publishers who the public generally see as either neutral or even "good". Activision are certainly amongst the publishers who seem to take a joy in making things needlessly difficult for developers, often seeming to work to undermine the development process and make the games that are being worked on worse.

I'm sure from on high there's a business standpoint where it all makes sense, but as a lowly grunt working in the trenches, they just appear to be villainous and possibly insane.

I understand the point you're trying to make, but I can't blame people for disliking him when he's gone on the record as wanting to "take the fun out of making games". If you're a consumer then it probably doesn't effect you that much until you want to complain about how watered down COD 12 is. If you're a developer or a creative though, then this man is trying to ruin the industry you love by twisting it into nothing more than a money making operation where the content is no longer valued more than the bottom line.